I was thinking the other day that your average media planner or buyer is a lot like Spider-man.

Once media people were the class weaklings, getting locker doors slammed in their faces, not being invited to the initial strategy meetings, that kind of thing. Then almost overnight, media people were transformed from awkward, geeky backroomers to guardians of the new advertising, wielding the power to assemble huge multi-million dollar converged media buys, place products in TV shows and push through magazine ads that spill into surrounding editorial.

It’s a wonderful transformation, of course, but planners and buyers have to remember what Peter Parker’s uncle told him shortly before snuffing it: ‘Along with great power comes great responsibility.’

These days, you can place Doritos in Survivor, tell the producers of American Idol what colour the casting couch should be (Coke red), dictate what kind of vodka, snowmobile, car, electric razor, cell phone and watch James Bond uses, and you can have Nike Presto swirls snaking into adjacent editorial pages.

And I have to admit, I find this stuff pretty exciting: as many have pointed out, some of it isn’t new (yes, soap operas got their name because they were sponsored by soap companies) – but we’re a lot more sophisticated now. We don’t have newscasters smoking Winstons and we don’t have those hokey game shows with product names incorporated into all the questions.

Well, actually we do. Maybe not the cigarettes (although you can bet your client’s bottom dollar the tobacco companies would do it if they could), but have you watched Jeopardy lately? I don’t remember questions like ‘What pink creamy stomach remedy has been helping Americans for 100 years?’ appearing on the show a few years ago.

Then there was an advance screening of James Bond: Die Another Day that Ford Motor Company of Canada was kind enough to invite me to a couple of months ago. I thought that perhaps I would be surrounded by other journalists, but soon discovered the audience was padded with execs from the sponsoring companies.

James Bond rescues Jinx from drowning in an ice room filled with water? Silence. Bond picks up his Norelco Spectra electric razor to get a close, personalized shave? The guys in the peanut gallery go nuts, hooting and hollering in appreciation. Talk about making the product the hero.

The cheers that went up whenever Bond sipped his Finlandia vodka or looked at his Omega Seamaster watch made me hyper-aware of the placements, of course, but even without that, I think I would have found the placements intrusive – they were interfering with the quality of the entertainment product.

But who cares about me? What’s more worrying is the fact that a recent Ad Age survey found that 75% of U.S. consumers have noticed an increase in the amount of advertising integrated into film and TV over the last year, and 62% found it distracting.

This message is getting through to some of the U.S. network execs, with Fox announcing that product placement will be toned down in this season of American Idol and the WB Network seemingly discovering for the first time that ‘if you don’t satisfy the viewer, you have nothing to offer,’ after Ford’s No Boundaries drew such poor ratings in the U.S. that it was cancelled half-way through.

The fact is that pushing film and TV producers to incorporate blatant shills, pushing magazines and newspapers to accommodate unmarked advertorials and even skew their content to your client’s favour, pushing radio DJs to incorporate inappropriate product mentions into their banter – that’s not creative, that’s just pushy. You can make them do it, because they’re desperate for the money, but that doesn’t mean you should.

I’m not saying that feeling out integration boundaries is a bad thing, but as Astrid Van Den Broek points out in ‘Showing a little restraint’ on page one, you just have to keep the audience in mind when you do it.

Remember that producing compelling news coverage, must-read magazines, popular TV shows and blockbuster movies is a lot harder than it looks. In a way, the producers of that content are collectively your golden goose: respect them and they’ll keep laying those audience-grabbing golden eggs; tear into the goose, and you can kiss those eggs goodbye.

Duncan Hood

editor, Strategy MEDIA